Saturdays in the Cemetery with Stine

by Nelson

Reader Beware; You’re in for a Scare!

Join us as DoubtFire ventures into the terrifying world of zombies, werewolves, egg monsters, and annoying siblings that is GOOSEBUMPS. 

Goosebumps #6 – Let’s Get Invisible!

Apparently Let’s Get Invisible! is a book that R.L. Stine is particularly fond of. You can tell that, with this story, the series is starting to figure out its identity and really hitting its stride. It’s far, far less gory than its predecessors, and stakes are becoming things like “you’ll live forever in the mirror world!” instead of “now you’ve got to die!” That said, Let’s Get Invisible is also the first straight up silly Goosebumps book we’ve gotten so far (though it’s going to look very, very tame in comparison to some of the titles we’ve got coming up).

Max narrates the lurid tale of the time he and his friends went exploring in the attic during his birthday party. Like Say Cheese and Die, the book features sort of an ensemble cast. We’ve got Max’s three friends – Zack the competitive one, April the shy one, Erin the loud one and this book’s “really pretty” girl – and his little brother Noah but call him Lefty cause he’s left handed and that’s what you call left handed people. The supporting cast is a little bit more important than they are in Say Cheese and Die, but Max and Lefty are the book’s designated sibling duo and main characters. Let’s Get Invisible doesn’t waste much time before getting down to business. The kids discover a strange mirror hidden away in a secret room no one has ever noticed before because the parents apparently haven’t bothered to even look in the attic of the home that they own. Max pulls an overhead light chain to get a better view of the mirror and immediately disappears right in front of everyone. Because this ain’t no ordinary mirror. It’s a mirror of invisibility!

Initially, everyone is pretty skeptical – somehow thinking that a straight up disappearance complete with a disembodied voice and objects that seem to float in the air could be a “trick of the light” or a “trapdoor somewhere.” Before long, though, the whole gang is coming over and holding “how long can we stay invisible?” competitions in between dreaming up cool invisible stuff to do like holding more “how long can we stay invisible?” competitions. And Lefty is getting invisible and tickling the family while they’re trying to have dinner. The one thing that no one seems to worry too much about is where this magical mirror came from and why it makes folks disappear when you switch on the light above it. I mean, is it really the mirror that does the disappearing, or is it the light? Would the mirror work in a room without an old school chain pull light? The kids just keep making themselves disappear, even after it takes progressively longer and longer to reappear and everyone reports feeling like it’s a struggle to come back. In fact, the common consensus amongst they group is that they all feel “pulled” towards something, but, hey, Zack was invisible for fifteen minutes. Gotta break the record.

When Max notices that his friends are sporting reversed hairstyles and acting weird, they gang up on and forcibly disappear him. It’s then that we learn the utterly terrifying truth. Turning invisible causes you to be sucked into the mirror world and replaced in the real world by your evil reflection! Max’s doppelganger gloats about how he’s about to doom our narrator to life as a reflection. But Good Max somehow manages to outrun Evil Max and escape back into the real world. When his evil mirror friends try to force him back in, Lefty shows up and shatters the looking glass of doom with a baseball, causing all of the doppelgangers to immediately be sucked into the broken glass and replaced with their normal non-evil selves. Max is super happy about all of this until he notices that Lefty is suddenly right handed – bringing the story to a close and leaving one to wonder why the Righty version of Lefty didn’t get sucked back into the mirror like the other evil kids or why he would have shattered it in the first place when the bad guys were about to win. But R.L. Stine is all about stories that teach life lessons, and the lesson here is that sometimes things just don’t make any damn sense, particularly when dealing with evil doppelgangers that live in antique furniture.

“Whose mirror is it? Who built it?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “How should I know? I’m only your reflection, remember?”

“But how—”

“It’s time,” he said eagerly. “Don’t try to stall with foolish questions. Time to make the switch. Time for you to become my reflection!”